Ch. 039| The Threshold

Only one oil-lamp was lit in the old pill-kiln.

Lin Que sat cross-legged by the fire-pit, his back against that face of stone wall that had not caved. Han Bosheng crouched three paces across from him, short blade laid across his knees, those muddy old eyes fixed on him without a blink.

"Thought it through?" Han Bosheng asked once more. "Those who charged this layer—Senior Brother Chen, Senior Brother Du, that Xu fellow—one after another, all fell. Your Breathing Scroll and their Xuanzhao Breathing Art, flawed in the same place. This charge of yours is no different from laying your neck on the same blade-edge."

"They didn't have this." From his robes Lin Que drew that piece of living-qi jade marrow and set it on his knee. The faint living-qi glowed warm in the lamplight. He drew out too a roll of creased thin paper—the mending method for the sixth layer of the Xuanzhao Breathing Art, which he had traced with ash by a guttering lamp behind the ebony door, among the deep scrolls. "And they didn't have these eyes."

He spread the traced paper flat on his knee and looked it over once more by the lamp. That sixth-layer qi-channel someone had cut away—how it should have run, where the missing stroke should have veered, where it closed—the tracing recorded it dead clear. In his heart he ran the course once more, ran it till he could not err with his eyes shut, and then put the tracing away.

This threshold, no one else could set a hand to; Han could be no help either. Lin Que kept him standing guard here for another reason: should he run afire, his spirit-sense scattered, there would be someone to drag him out of the fire—so he would not, like that Xu fellow, be ruined soundlessly in a place no one knew.

"When I run my qi up to that threshold at the sixth layer, you watch my face." Lin Que said. "If I bleed from the seven apertures, if my breath goes wild, don't mind anything else—do as I taught you: strike my vital-gate point with one palm, break the qi. Better to ruin this one layer than to run afire."

Han Bosheng set his face and nodded, moved the clay bowl of clear water to hand, and shifted the short blade to his side, freeing his hand.

Lin Que closed his eyes.

---

First he sank his qi.

The Breathing Scroll's qi rose from the dantian and drew up layer by layer. These six months, enduring at the herb-lodge and secretly cultivating by night, he had trodden the fifth layer of Qi Condensation dead-steady—the qi ran to the pivot-point of the fifth layer, coiled through, smooth and easy, not a fraction of clogging.

Further up was the sixth layer's threshold.

Lin Que's left eye brightened beneath his shut lids. He did not look outward; he looked into his own meridians—the qi ran to before the pivot-point of the sixth layer, and there, at that one place, a stroke was missing.

The very same as the one in Senior Brother Chen's spine. A stroke cut away by a human hand, its opening and its closing both still there, only the middle stretch of qi-channel snapped away out of nothing. The qi rushed to the break and, with nowhere to turn, jammed there, all of it, piling denser and denser—force it further up, and it bursts; it runs afire.

When Senior Brother Chen and the rest charged this far, they could not see this flaw. They took it only for their own insufficient tempering, their unsteady mind-state, and gritting their teeth forced up in one breath—the qi rammed the break, and with nowhere to go, rebounded, and burst their sound meridians apart from within. Blood spat, cultivation ruined, life lost—all in that one ramming.

Lin Que could see.

He did not hurry to ram. In his spirit-sense, the mending method from that tracing unrolled slowly: the stroke cut away began three-tenths above the upper edge of the break, drew slanting down, and closed at the turn of the next segment of qi-channel. One stroke mended, and the broken qi-channel joined again into a single line, and the qi had a road to travel.

But this stroke could not be drawn from nothing by the spirit-sense alone. The flaw on the qi-channel had to be filled with "living-qi"—which was exactly why he had staked that piece of jade marrow.

He concentrated his spirit, and drew the jade marrow's living-qi, strand by strand, to mend the break.

---

The jade marrow's living-qi was far fiercer than that broken jade years ago.

The first strand of living-qi drawn into the break, and beneath Lin Que's left eye came a swelling "hmm," a flash of white light before his eyes, his temples throbbing—he near failed to hold it down. This living-qi came out of a rift: wild, headlong, untamed, and once drawn out it wanted to bolt every which way, of an entirely different temper from the soft qi he was used to nurturing in his dantian.

He bit down and drew his spirit-sense taut as a fine thread, and like a herdsman driving a stubborn ox, tamed it a fraction at a time: first blocking the living-qi's bolting momentum, then guiding it along the course of the tracing's mending method, drawing it to fill into the break. Fill a fraction too fast and it disperses; a fraction too slow and it stiffens—the measure lay all on that one thread of spirit-sense.

The sweat on his brow fell drop by drop onto the cloth at his knee.

Halfway through the filling, that chill in his heart stirred again.

This living-qi out of the rift, filled into the flaw where the art had been cut, fit seamlessly—the stretch the break was missing, and this living-qi in the jade marrow, were as if they had been meant to grow in one place, their veining and their force not a hair's breadth off. The flaw someone had cut from the art had to be filled with material dredged from a rift, and only then did it settle so snugly…

The thought was too vast, too cold. Lin Que pressed it dead back down to the bottom of his heart—to divide off a strand of spirit now was to run afire.

He pressed his whole spirit-sense back onto that break.

The living-qi filled inch by inch, and the broken stretch of qi-channel, drawn along by the mending method and cushioned by the living-qi, actually joined again bit by bit. First a single line joined, and the qi tried to flow across, tried three times; by the third, that line had widened to a finger's breadth, and the qi flowed smooth.

The instant the break mended flat, the true qi jammed before the threshold, with a roar, slackened, and found its road.

---

It was that very slackening that near spoiled things.

The break opened through, and that true qi—held jammed all this while, and spurred to full head by the jade marrow's living-qi—rushed suddenly at the pivot-point of the sixth layer, too fast, too fierce, far beyond what Lin Que had foreseen. He felt only a qi-channel strained to searing pain, gold stars swarming before his eyes, that qi on the verge of bursting the pivot-point and slamming into the still-unnurtured channels further up.

Once it slammed up, it was running afire. The very same running afire as Senior Brother Chen.

"Lin Que!" Han Bosheng flung his whole body across, one palm already raised above his vital-gate point, waiting only for his color to change to strike down.

"Don't—move—" Lin Que forced three words through his teeth, the veins at his temple leaping.

That palm of Han Bosheng's halted stock-still in mid-air.

In that hair's-breadth moment, Lin Que sank his spirit-sense down hard, and like reining a bolted wild horse, seized dead that true qi run past its head. He wrung out the very last of the jade marrow's living-qi and cushioned it beneath that bolting qi as a buffer—slow, slow, slow. That qi at last slowed, spun once before the pivot-point, and tamed, coiled through, and sank back into the dantian.

The dantian sank, and the qi-sea was a ring broader than before.

That threshold, which had trapped three men to death, was passed.

The sixth layer of Qi Condensation.

---

Lin Que opened his eyes; the clothes at his back were soaked through with cold sweat, sticking cold against the stone wall. A wave of sweetish blood rose in his throat, and he swallowed it back.

The jade marrow at his knee, its living-qi drained away, had become a dead, heavy dark stone—the same end as that broken jade years ago: wrung dry, spent. His left eye was swollen with pain near past opening, the heat in its depths thinned a stretch; whatever he looked at was veiled in a film of mist, and it would take a good few days' rest before it eased back.

The price was not light. But this layer was worth it.

He tried running the newly-nurtured sixth-layer qi once round his meridians. The qi ran to that mended break with not a fraction of clogging, and passed smooth; ran to the sixth-layer pivot-point, and coiled steady there too. The mended stroke held. The sixth-layer qi was a stretch thicker than the fifth, and running it once round his meridians, even that old channel at his left rib, mended in earlier years, was steadier than before.

That raised hand of Han Bosheng's froze in mid-air, and only after a long while did it slowly come down. He stared at Lin Que, and the look on that old face was hard to name—whether shock, or something else.

"Passed." he said hoarsely, his voice a little dry. "I charged all my life, ran afire nine times, and nine times fell back before this very threshold. Fall back once, ruin a stretch; and to this day, this cultivation of mine is still stuck below this threshold." He paused. "You… passed in one go."

He said no more. A man barred before this threshold all his life, barred till his cultivation was wholly ruined, watching a youth mend that flaw no one could see and pass it steady and sound—that taste was more tangled by several turns than passing it himself would have been.

---

Lin Que rested a good while before he braced against the stone wall and rose, his legs somewhat numb.

He did not hurry off. Senior Brother Chen, Senior Brother Du, that Xu fellow—those who charged this threshold, every one took it for their own insufficient tempering, and to death, to ruin, never knew: the stroke missing on that threshold had been deliberately cut away by a man, waiting right here to take their lives.

This he did not say to Han. Said, it would only add one more man who could not sleep.

But Han Bosheng spoke first, sliding the short blade back into its sheath and lowering his voice: "There's a thing I have to tell you while we're at it. Day before yesterday I went down the mountain, and Madam Chang sent word by someone—"

Lin Que raised his eyes.

"Our rift crystals, vine-hearts, ink-cores from these few trips all passed through the Guangyuan Company's hands." Han Bosheng said. "That jade-token buyer who monopolizes the stock has put word about the market these past days, asking everywhere—the stock that's newly turned up on the market lately, by what channel did it come, and who's putting it out. Madam Chang has held off answering, but she had me pass word to you: this wind's blowing hard."

The oil-lamp's flame swayed once.

Lin Que gripped that dead, heavy dark stone in his palm.

Hunting these rifts on the sly, selling this stock on the sly—they had run a few trips heads-down, smooth and easy, opened for business auspiciously. But as the stock went piece by piece onto the market, the hand that gripped the whole stock-trade had noticed—this extra batch of stock with no provenance, from where exactly did it come, who was putting it out. And now that hand lifted its head and was looking, along the Guangyuan Company's channel, toward these people whose stove had barely been lit.

Lin Que tucked that spent dark stone into his robes.

"The stock, hold it in the roost for now, don't put any more out through the Guangyuan Company." he said low. "What that hand wants to find is 'who's putting out the extra stock.' These next days, let not one more piece turn up on the market—don't let him feel his way here along this channel."

Han Bosheng narrowed his eyes: "Cut off the outflow, and where do the conducting-materials and stock-money you'll want for climbing layers come from? The few mouths in this roost have to eat too."

"Set against letting that hand feel its way to this roost along the stock," Lin Que said, "cutting off the road to fortune a few days is nothing." He looked toward that black, deep blighted ground at the kiln's mouth. "What that buyer collects all this rift-stock for—that, I have to make clear first. Only once I've made him out do I know whether this stock can still be put out from now on, and how."

【Ch. 039 End · Xuanzhao's back-mountain · the old pill-kiln of the blighted ground】